


Bad trip

by amonitrate



Category: Highlander: The Series
Genre: Gen, None - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-29
Updated: 2017-04-29
Packaged: 2018-10-25 12:52:01
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 393
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10764636
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amonitrate/pseuds/amonitrate
Summary: He'd lied to MacLeod about the last time he felt guilt.





	Bad trip

**Author's Note:**

> The first drabble is for [](http://juniperphoenix.livejournal.com/profile)[](http://juniperphoenix.livejournal.com/)**juniperphoenix** who asked for HL set in the 1960's and mentioned Methos' comment about the Rolling Stones. This is what came out of my head. I wasn't around for the time, so I apologize if I misrepresent the events, but this is the image that popped in my mind.
> 
> * * *
> 
> originally written between 2001-2006

He’d lied to MacLeod about the last time he felt guilt.  
  
MacLeod had no way of knowing what lay behind the flippant remark about the Rolling Stones, and Methos didn’t plan to enlighten him. He hadn’t exactly stood on the stage at the same time as the Stones but he’d been there as chaos turned dark, as the pleasant buzz he’d nurtured through most of 1969 soured. As the impossible dream was bludgeoned and rent apart.  
  
Altamont wasn’t the worst experience of his long life, but it wasn’t something he talked about.  
  
It was a cliche now, that utopia was annihilated under the pool-cues of the Hell’s Angels. A morality tale, a pop legend, a mere coda to the myth that was the 1960's. Twenty-five years had reduced the harsh reality to a paragraph for the history books.  
  
And yet when he heard “Under My Thumb” his chest still seized, leaving him breathless and dizzy.  
  
His recollection of the concert is broken, the edges left jagged. Images that lurch free of any order. Music and the faces of panic, blood and beer, gyrating bodies and the flash of knives. He who had controlled legions with the sound of his voice left silent and powerless.  
  
Children, they were all children, and if he hadn’t been out of his head he might have been able to wrest control. When he thought of Altamont at all, it was with the sinking horror of a parent whose child died during a single moment’s neglect.  
  
Two days later he was on a jet to London, still shaking from flashbacks and dreaming of a sea of faces, the waving fronds of hands. For weeks he saw those hands out of the corner of his eye even while awake.  
  
He fled across the ocean and found work as a stonemason in the British countryside, began the slow process of creating a new identity. The mask that would become Adam Pierson was seven years old, blissful and ignorant.  
  
And Methos didn’t return to the States until Kristin Gilles opened her Seacouver branch.

* * *

Disclaimer: All publicly recognizable characters and settings are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. No money is being made from this work. No copyright infringement is intended.  
  
This story archived at <http://hlfiction.net/viewstory.php?sid=127>


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